Untamed: (Heath & Violet) (Beg For It)

by Callie Harper

  But it was a means to an end, I kept telling myself. Everyone had to make their way up in the world. I’d been given a great opportunity working at the Fame! Network. I knew people, or at least knew people who knew people, and in a field based on who-knew-who, relationships were gold. At least they’d better be, because I wasn’t paid all that much. And what I did earn I spent on things like lingerie.

  Like the panties Heath had ripped clean off me last night.

  OK, time to force myself out of bed. Otherwise, I’d spend the entire day lounging around dreaming about the Scottish highlands warrior I’d met masquerading as a Vermont local in a dive bar. My fantasy life knew no bounds, particularly when given such delicious fuel.

  Padding into the main room of the condo, I noticed an envelope on the floor by the front door. It looked like it had been pushed through the mail slot. Was Gary already billing me for the condo? Opening it up, I discovered a car rental agreement and a set of keys. To an SUV.

  I opened the door and immediately closed it. Rookie mistake! I was wearing a T-shirt that ended mid-thigh and it had to be about 70 degrees below zero out there with a vicious, blustery wind. Choosing more wisely, I peeked out the kitchen window. Parked right in front of the door was a huge SUV, the kind of behemoth you could probably enter in a monster truck rally and win. Inside the envelope was a short note:

  Got you an upgrade. The circus needed its clown car back.

  That was all. No signature, but no signature was required. Who else would have done such a thing? Against my better judgment, a smile snuck its way along my lips, tugging at my indignation and pulling it along into a little laughter and, honestly, relief. That tiny convertible had been a disaster. In an SUV like the one sitting outside, I’d be golden. I could knock right into a tree and the tree would probably apologize before it fell right over.

  But Heath shouldn’t have done it. And how had he done it? Had he called the rental agency and pretended to be me? I should probably refuse the gesture.

  But I didn’t have his phone number. He hadn’t even signed the note, so there was no way of actually pinning it to him. He’d made it practically impossible to refuse.

  Even with the SUV, I didn’t leave the condo the entire day. It was too cold, and I needed to catch up on my reading. Relying on a protein bar and an apple from my purse, I settled on the couch and learned all the facts and figures and local history of Watson, Vermont. I had to admit, I got more into it than I would have guessed, and soon dusk was settling and my co-worker Sam arrived.

  “Where the hell are we!?!” He burst through my door, pushing in before I’d even had time to fully open it myself. He looked pale and shaken, like he’d just seen a ghost.

  “It’s so cold outside!” I shut the door with perhaps more force than required, but I didn’t like the looks of things out there. No one had proven the existence of Bigfoot yet, but if the creature were real he’d surely be living in the woods surrounding this condo. Actually, if we could get Bigfoot on tape? Could you say ratings through the roof?

  “What do you have to drink?!?” Sam frequently spoke in catty exclamations back in L.A. I guessed in Vermont he still made exclamations, they just sounded more desperate.

  “I think there are some Lipton tea bags in one of the cabinets.”

  His eyebrows rose, so appalled at my response he couldn’t even form words. Speechlessness was new for Sam. He’d made me spit out a drink more than once with his endless supply of snarky observations. He was always fun to have around. I just hoped I never ended up on the receiving end of his sharp wit. I bet it could cut like a knife.

  Disgusted, he satisfied himself with pouring a glass of water from the tap, then set it down untouched on a coffee table.

  “Will we survive?” he asked, and I wasn’t even sure if he was playing up the drama. He might really be wondering. He was a city boy through and through. Fame! probably should have sent someone with us, like a Sherpa with a compass and a backpack of supplies to help us navigate.

  “We’ll make it,” I reassured him, grateful he was along for the ride. He was an amazing talent scout. He’d picked out more hot models and actors from malls and fast food joints than you could count. Cheekbones, he’d explained to me, were like a poker player’s tell. They gave it all away. With the right set of high, well-defined cheekbones, everything else could fall into place.

  What would he think of Heath’s cheekbones? I felt a sudden rush of protectiveness, like I wanted to growl and guard what was mine. Over our stay in Watson, Sam and I were bound to run into that hotter-than-hell mountain man, and I could already see it. Sam’s eyes would light up like he was hearing a winner’s “ding ding ding” on a game show. Heath would make the network a whole lot of money. He was just the right kind of man-meat viewers would tune in to see week after week in action. And judging by Heath’s skills last night, he really would deliver. It didn’t matter that I didn’t want to share him with anyone else, never mind millions of viewers.

  Sam perched on the couch, seeming distrustful of the fabric. It probably hadn’t been properly cleaned between rentals. But it was comfy. I sat next to him and picked up the packet that had been prepared for me.

  We’d been given a whole bunch of information on the town, our projected budget, and some character sketch ideas. Because even though it was a reality show, we were still casting characters, or at least character types.

  “So. Nine a.m. tomorrow. The Mayor of Hicksville.” Sam glanced at our itinerary, which had us kicking off our week meeting with the mayor of Watson. “Get ready for a hard sell.”

  “You think?” I’d prepared myself with some talking points, including all of the ways in which a show in their town would help their local economy, but I didn’t know about a hard sell. Did he think they’d be so resistant?

  “They’re going to sell us!” Sam clarified, throwing up his hands theatrically. “A show here would be the best thing that’s ever happened to them. It’d put them on the map! Flood them with tourism! This mayor is going to beg us to come here, just you wait.”

  Hmm. I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t even sure we wanted to film there yet. “First let’s make sure we want to do a show in Watson.”

  “I know, right?” Sam snorted. “Who are we going find here to cast? They’ll all need shave-downs and a month-long juice fast before they go anywhere near a camera.”

  Sighing, I looked at the list our boss had drafted on a potential cast of characters:

  1. Firefighter

  That was a no-brainer. Firefighters had to stay fit. They were young and hot and heroic. A hunky firefighter shouldn’t be too hard to find.

  2. Coach (hockey)?

  I guessed hockey must be big in Vermont. I didn’t think I’d ever seen a hockey game in my life. They played with sticks, right?

  3. Teacher

  Maybe.

  4. Ski dude—Mad Mountain

  Apparently there was a local ski place with all kinds of unique, distinctive Vermont characters. I didn’t understand what that was yet, but I could see it being a good type to cast.

  5. Restaurateur

  I had a difficult time wrapping my mind around that one. What kind of restaurateur would we find out in the middle of nowhere? But, supposedly, there were a couple of locally-sourced thriving restaurants in Watson. We just had to find out if any of the owners were hot enough for TV.

  6. Farmer—organic?

  That I could picture. And it would be perfect if we could find some big, burly guy or his flower power female equivalent, all dreamy-eyed and save the earth. With good teeth.

  7. Craftsman

  Apparently Watson had a thriving local artisan scene. I’d met one of them last night. Heath had said he worked with wood and metal. Good with his hands.

  “Having a hot flash?” Sam asked, noting my pink cheeks.

  “I guess I’m just nervous about tomorrow.” I stood up and got myself a glass of water. “I don’t know what we’re going to find here. Either way, I h
ope we can call it quick. If there’s a show here or not, we should know by the end of the week.”

  “Please, get me out of here,” Sam agreed. He left for his adjoining condo where he had a bottle or two he’d taken from last night’s hotel minibar.

  I slipped into bed and tried to fall asleep. Nine a.m. tomorrow would feel brutally early if my body clock was still set on L.A. time. But even a fast-paced, steamy romance novel on my Kindle didn’t do the trick. My own mind raced even faster, taking me to even hotter scenes than those described on my eReader.

  The way Heath had held me, so possessive with a hint of rough. His lips on my neck, licking, tasting, sucking almost to the point of it hurting but it hadn’t hurt, not in a bad way that you wanted to stop. It had felt electrifying, like he wanted to devour me and could barely hold himself back.

  I guess I’d grown accustomed to the L.A. version of the male/female mating ritual. The man would flash his Rolex to demonstrate his wealth. The woman would thrust out her breasts as she laughed to let him view her assets. The man would wonder aloud if she was an actress and offer to send her a script. And it would all go on from there down an all-too-predictable path.

  Nothing had been predictable with Heath, least of all my body’s reaction to him. Without even consciously deciding, my Kindle fell to the side and my fingers found their way down to where I still ached and throbbed for Heath. I slipped my fingers in under my panties, right where I was already wet just thinking about him.

  I let myself moan, softly, as I started stroking, remembering how his fingers had felt last night. He’d known exactly how to touch me, right where to press, exactly how to work me into a frenzy. The smell of him, the feel of his hand on the small of my back, clutching my hip. The way he’d plunged his two broad fingers up inside of me, making me arch back and come, hard, for him. He drank it in, watching me as I screamed and shuddered and came on his fingers just how he told me to.

  I came again, moaning into my pillow, shaking and dazed in the bed in my condo. Once again, I marveled over how that man had made me come so quickly, so hard. And this time it was just the thought of him affecting me more strongly than any other man I’d known.

  I hoped I didn’t see him again. It would make things too complicated. Even though I really wanted to see him again.

  CHAPTER 6

  Heath

  I knew there was a table inside all that metal. I just needed to get it out. I’d found the old hood of a car in a junkyard nearby. A 1969 Chevy Camero. Whoever had scrapped that beauty should be charged with a federal crime. Good thing I’d come along to give it new life.

  It still had the fins in tact, but the headlights were long gone. I’d had to search to find something authentic I could use in their place. I wasn’t sure exactly how it was all going to come together, but that was always how it was when I started on a piece. Something about the reclaimed wood or the scrap metal suggested something more, something else. I couldn’t always put it into words or even envision what the end result would be, but I could see the potential.

  The great thing about Vermont—or one of the many great things about it—was the space. You could collect up here and not run out of space to put it all. Growing up, I’d always had the tendency to find bits and pieces along the sidewalks of Manhattan. Junk my mother had declared it, and our housekeeper had waged a daily battle on her behalf, trying to weed out and dispose of my treasured oddities.

  Now, I owned a big old warehouse with the sole purpose of storing junk. My dream come true. I loved the scraps others dismissed, the pieces rejected by the lumberyard, the hulking relics sacrificed to the local dump. I didn’t like thinking in glorified terms about what I did for a living. Basically, I made furniture.

  But just between you and me, the process felt like a lot more than that. I lost myself in it, transforming junk into useful and treasured possessions. Taking something discarded and cast off, I found new purpose and even beauty in it. It felt a little like magic to transform something from landfill into a dining table and chairs for families to gather together and eat meals. Or rocking chairs, those I really liked, taking rejected scrap and transforming them into something comforting and traditional, a place to soothe your baby or set out on the porch and watch time ooze by.

  I hadn’t started out with the sole purpose of making money, but the funny thing was my pieces were starting to sell pretty well. I displayed my work with the artisan collective in town. We all chipped in for a storefront to connect with tourists passing through. I knew I was shit at marketing and I could do more, much more to grow my business. One day maybe I would. For now, though, I was content to make just enough. Enough pieces to satisfy customers, and enough money to cover my modest living expenses.

  I had a good thing going. I didn’t operate within limits or constraints. My days were my own. And most days I lost myself in my work, no sense of passing time.

  Except for today, things weren’t going as planned. I kept finding myself gazing out into the middle distance. In and of itself, that wasn’t such a bad thing, but if you were holding a blowtorch the stakes got higher. I nearly cut a chunk out of my treasured Chevy hood. All because of Violet.

  I wondered if she’d discovered the SUV yet. I hadn’t even needed to break into her MINI. After I’d dropped her off last night, my raging hard-on protesting mightily against my jeans, I’d returned to the bar to see what I could do about switching out her ride. She’d left the door to her rental car open.

  Impractical. High maintenance. And damn if she hadn’t tasted like honey on a fresh baked bun, so good you had to close your eyes while you licked so you didn’t miss a thing. She’d felt so right, so slick and hot, working her pussy against my fingers, so desperate and needy in my truck. The sight of her succumbing to the pleasure, tossing her head back and coming with a throaty cry, bucking down onto my hand. That image kept playing over and over, like a glitch or a skip in my brain.

  Maybe today wasn’t the best day to use a blowtorch. I turned off the open flame and put down the tool, flipped up the mask on my helmet and took off my gloves. What was wrong with me today?

  True, I’d been leading a solitary existence, but I’d had my share of women. It wasn’t as if that had been the first time I’d ever made a woman come. But it had felt like it. It didn’t make sense, but I guessed this wasn’t my brain doing the responding. There was something about Violet, some kind of chemical reaction, and I knew all about that. As a metalworker, I’d studied the science of combustion, the transformation from solid to liquid, the melting point. Something about that woman heated me up quick. And I sure as hell had enjoyed finding her melting point.

  Time for a break. It was dark out, but I didn’t know what time. I purposely didn’t have a clock in my workshop. I didn’t want to be governed by the rigid passage of minutes and hours. I wanted to manage my own life, dictate how I devoted my time.

  I did have a cell phone, though. I didn’t really want one but even I realized they came in handy. I glanced at it and saw I had a text. From Ash, one of my brothers:

  Hey, man, let me know soon.

  Right. I didn’t know what to do about that one. I took off my helmet and ran my hand through my hair, leaning against the frame of a window in my workshop. The light at the front door of my cabin was on. In the glow I could see a few flakes still drifting past. It didn’t look like it was snowing so much as blowing around, the powder picked up and thrown around by nature’s snowball fight.

  I had two older brothers, Colt and Ash. We didn’t have too many snowball fights in our history to look back on fondly. We’d never disliked each other—Ash and I had even shared a room for a couple years when I’d been around five or six, him seven or eight—but our family didn’t exactly do warm and fuzzy. Maybe it was the cold, aristocratic British blood on my father’s side, or maybe it was the American socialite strain on my mother’s. Either way, it meant that all of our family photos were posed. Never a hair out of place, never a voice raised.


  Until all hell had broken loose. When I’d been nine my mother had found out that my father had had a baby with another woman. She’d divorced him, spiraling down into a deep alcoholic depression. My father had taken it as a Get Out of Jail Free card and devoted 110 percent of himself to growing Kavanaugh Industries into the empire it was today. They’d both basically stopped parenting completely.

  Both of my brothers had taken off, leaving for boarding school. Since I was younger, I’d had to wait a little longer to do the same. While Colt chose to follow directly in our father’s footsteps, both Ash and—once I got old enough—I had hit the eject button, leaving our whole fucked up family behind for good. We’d sure taken opposite approaches to setting off on our own, though. Once I grew up, I’d taken myself off the grid. Instead, Ash had lit the grid up, somehow becoming a bonafide rockstar on the cover of tabloid magazines.

  Except over the past year it seemed he’d changed course. He was getting married in May. To a children’s librarian. And over the holidays he’d asked me to be the best man at their wedding. I still hadn’t given him an answer.

  On the one hand, when one of your brothers asked you to be the best man at his wedding, you said yes. I understood that. I was pretty floored that Ash had asked me. It meant a lot.

  The only problem was if I said yes, then I’d have to be the best man at his wedding. It would not be a small, simple wedding. I’d bet money the guest list would come in close to the entire population of Watson. The event would be crawling with celebrities. Not my thing.

  I put my phone down, not responding yet. Damn it, I felt so wound up, like I had a live current of electricity pounding through me. I needed to work out. Good thing I’d built my own CrossFit gym in my gigantic warehouse.

  Had I mentioned the space I had in Vermont? A few years ago, when I was 21, I’d bought two acres of land. Rich kid, I know. I rolled my eyes about it, too.

  But the thing about Vermont was land came cheap. Everything was relative. Turned out owning two acres of a wooded lot in Vermont cost about the same as renting an annual parking space on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. I didn’t even need to dip into my trust fund to make the purchase. I simply wrote a check from the account established to meet my general, everyday expenses. It was such a small amount to my family that no one had even batted an eye.